Thank you, Roland Emmerich. In these times
when America
and the world are gripped tight in disasters built entirely by and for
human
beings, it's good to step back once in a while and appreciate the
entirely
nonhuman catastrophes just waiting to clobber us whether we've got our
own shit
worked out by then or not.

Like, for example, rapid climate change. The
Day After
Tomorrow, of course, takes the whole thing to retarded Hollywood
extremes with
a huge megastorm that brings down a new Ice Age in three days, but
there are folks
in the climate community who've done projections of huge shifts that
take place
in the 10-20 year range and the Pentagon took those projections
seriously
enough to do a study of the strategic implications of a major change in
Earth's
climate (quick summary: lots of wars, we're all dead).

So -- rapid climate change *is* something to
be scared of. Of
course, The Day After Tomorrow doesn't actually have anything to say
about this
beyond a vague "we should do something," but that's not its point.
Its purpose is to throw stormy horrors at Americans and maybe, a month
from
now, some of them will have disturbing dreams about being alone in the
snowswept ruins of their town, everything they've ever known blasted
away by
neverending winter.

As a movie, well, The Day After Tomorrow is
about what you'd
expect from the man who gave us Independence Day, Godzilla and The
Patriot.
That is, it's a series of special-effects destruction set pieces linked
together with a soap opera set of flunky characters runnin' around with
no real
thematic sense or overall point.

But! If you wanna see Los
Angeles
get torn apart by tornadoes, this is your movie. Likewise if your
secret
cataclysm fantasy is a New York
semi-submerged in water or a Tokyo
pelted by half-baby-sized hailstones. The Day After Tomorrow doesn't
quite have
a monster, exactly, in the way that Independence Day and Godzilla did;
the
closest thing it's got is a twirling continent-sized hurricane with a
50-mile-wide eye that sucks space-cold air down from the upper
atmosphere to
flash-freeze everything it stares at. Not bad, but y'can't really hate
it, and
more importantly you can't defuse it with a computer virus or trap it
in the BrooklynBridge
and kill it with missiles. You
just have to wait for it to kinda peter out.

Oh, yeah -- there are some people in this
movie, too. Dennis
Quaid is the Cassandra climatologist whose warnings go unheeded, though
of course
given the timeframes involved there's obviously dick anybody could have
done. Sela
Ward plays his wife, a doctor trapped in a cancer boy subplot that
sucks
precious oxygen from the theatre every flickering moment it appears.
Meanwhile
Quaid's son is Jake Gyllenhaal of Donnie Darko, a nerdy kid who was on
the
school debating team just so he could hang around with his would-be
girlfriend
Emmy Rossum (a charming enough Shannon Elizabeth/Mia Sara fusion) andso they both end up stuck along with another
nerd in flooded-then-frozen New York.
Thus they "struggle to survive", burning books in the New York Public
Library, facing computer-generated wolves and occasionally running from
super-ice that --no shit-- chases them down the hallway.

The Day After Tomorrow, like Independence
Day, features a
cast of characters uncommonly cool with seeing civilization shatter
around
them. They're so busy with the day-to-day, y'know, it never really
comes up,
and luckily the movie's over before anybody really has to sit down and
come to
grip with what's happened. The movie pretty much punts the only truly
interesting thing about this scenario, which is the issue of relocating
huge
human populations from newly unhabitable areas to newly less habitable
areas
that also happen to have huge human populations of their own. Rather
than the
typical rising sea-level disaster, this apocalypse has a keen sense of
geopolitical irony in that it freezes the northern hemisphere solid,
forcing
the rich to rely on the generosity of the poor. In the film, this
translates into
a scene that's supposed to make America
viewers go "Huh!" of Americans illegally crossing the border *into* Mexico
--fancy that!-- followed by the apparent relocation of 200 million
Americans to
a Mexican refugee camp. Wow --thanks for being such a good sport about
this, Mexico!

The movie plays with the destruction of America,
but like Emmerich's earlier The Patriot, it can't really conceive of a
world
where America
doesn't exist. Sure, we see an American flag flap listlessly in the
breeze before
superfreezing solid, and we see ol' Lady Liberty windblasted with
icicles, and
yeah, everybody in America
is either dead or in Mexico.
But The Day After Tomorrow dares not blast the audience with real
tragedy or
bleak hopelessness, so we feel it's just a matter of time before we get
all
this snow cleared away and get things back to normal. A cop-out, of
course, but
whaddya expect? This is Roland Emmerich we're talking about here.